BUMP TOP!!

I love this idea. It is so artsy to me. At first I thought that is was a bit unorganized and cluttered looking. But as he went through all the different features and showed off how much you could play around with things it definately won me over. I like the flipping through photos, it looks a lot easy to flip through and manage things. Anand Agarawala only looks like he's 18. But he knows what he's talking about when it comes to computers. I am very interested in the idea of bump top and would choose that over the old school version of a desktop.

A lyrical view of life on earth

For this weeks TED talk Frans Lanting's "a lyrical view of life on earth," stuck out to me. I'm going to school for photography and in this presentation this photographer for National Geographic puts together a slide show of pictures that he has taken on one of his journeys. I read some of the comments that other viewers had posted and its easy for me to agree that photographic journey through time is much more enjoyable and I think it is much more comprehendable. The music in the background is rather distracting though.

HTML Experience

In the fifth grade my class was required to make their own web page. We learnt some basic HTML codes, color codes, nothing to fancy. Our pages just consisted of different lettering styles, colors, fonts, page breaks, and it was information on ourselves. I have pages of notes from back then but I'm not all to sure where they are now or what program it was that we used. I enjoyed making my own web page and am excited to become more familiarized with it again.

War and Peace

In all honesty I hate discussions like this one. I'm not all up to date on what is going on in the world. I'll read through the newspaper and pick out the articles that catch my eye, but talks of this nature have no interest to me. I know this is mostly due to what little I know, and I don't quite understand what the heck he is talking about. I need things to be dumbed down when it come to the government and their tactics because they just don't make much sense to me. I don't believe in war however. We all live on this earth and need to share it's resources with one another. I don't think that killing or violence is a way of lending a hand and helping out. The U.S is power hungry, we have the most out of anyone yet we keep wanting more.

Artificial Intelligence

I came across this site : (http://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligence.html)

The site outlines the case for believing that we will have superhuman artificial intelligence within the first third of the next century. It looks at different estimates of the processing power of the human brain; how long it will take until computer hardware achieve a similar performance; ways of creating the software through bottom-up approaches like the one used by biological brains; how difficult it will be for neuroscience figure out enough about how brains work to make this approach work; and how fast we can expect superintelligence to be developed once there is human-level artificial intelligence.

Our Priorities for Saving the World

I must say that this TED talk from Bjorn Lomberg was rather disappointing. The beginning was very interested and he got my attention with the statistics on some one the problems that we are facing. Such as the 800 million who are starving, 1 billion are lacking in clean drinking water, 2 billion lack sanitation, 2 million dies each year from aids, 175 million international migrants, 940 million illiterate adults, and the several billion who are affected by global warming. Bjorn and the Copenhagen Consensus rank the top four challenges that we face are malaria, free trade, malnutrition and HIV/Aids at number one. All of the others were to costly and would take longer to make an impact than the ones suggested. Climate change was at the bottom of the list due to the high cost of money and the littlest impact it would have. Kyoto is an amendment to the international treaty on climate control. Personally I don't quite understand why this isn't among the top four problems that should be addressed first. They say that it is to costly yet why would we have to pay for it. It would be something to benefit everyone here on earth, who would not want to contribute to that. We could all pull together to help out with the environment. Bjorn also talked about how if we work on the four that are suggested it will save lives and the people in third world countries would eventually be making the amount of money that we do now as we would be making more too. I think that if we take the time to knock out one big problem the smaller ones will come easier. If global warming keeps up we will lose more and more resources till things become scarce. Why don't we feed the hungry? Why don't we lend a hand to those over seas in other countries with diseases? If we have the resources why are so many people doing without? Perhaps I'm being ignorant and things aren't as easy as that. However, I do know that money doesn't buy everything. Yet it seems to be what everyone is depending on to save the world. We need to look to people and ourselves to make a difference and not pieces of paper that we put face value on.

SLOW DOWN!!

So far this is my favorite TED talk. I couldn't agree with Carl Honore more. We try and press more and more into less time. We have turned everything into something to do quickly. Speed dialing, speed reading, speed dating, and speed walking are all examples. The majority of people in the world are living the fast life instead of the good life. Everyone is becoming more and more burnout by trying to do things quickly. When people hear the word slow they think of a person as being lazy or a slacker or even stupid. This is a cultural taboo that we have placed on these words. We all need to slow down and smell the roses, use our creative mode of thought, and savor life. People like moving fast for the adrenaline and they keep themselves so busy so that they don't have to ask themselves real questions. One of Carl's examples were, "If you're raising your kid right?" Carl also said that most of the emails he receives are from the younger age groups asking him to write a letter to their parents about slowing down. It is not just adults who aren't able to slow down its people of all age groups. We are marinated in the culture of speed. Relationships are even being fast paced. No one is taking the time for patience, tranquility or time, they would much rather walk away and not invest anymore time into it. Again this has been my favorite TED talk so far. And I hope everyone will take the TIME to watch it!

TED Talk

The art of creating creatures is about Theo Jansen from Holland, who constructed lifelike kinetic sculptures out of plastic tubing and lemonade bottles. These creatures are able to survive on their own with little help from Theo. In the years to come however the creatures should be able to survive entirely on their own. As of now they are able to walk on their own, store energy, transport 3.2 tons, change their direction when reaching unsafe grounds, such as bodies of water and protect themselves when it storms. When the speech first started out I didn't think that the clump of tubes to the left of the speaker was much. As the video ran on I was suprised and became really into his project. It wouldn't expect something so simple looking and made out of simple objects to have a mind of its own and function the way that it can.

News to me

I couldn't seem to get the videos to work either but I was able to watch the youtube one.


(http://www.google.com/reader/view/#directory-page)

Myspace/ Social Networking

It seems like in today's time that everyone and their mother has a myspace. I first came across Myspace in 2005 and have been using it since than. It is said that Myspace gets more page views than Google, with Facebook. I just recently became apart of Facebook but I find that more difficult to use and never take the time to login to it. Social Networking offers a variety of ways to communicate with others through chat, messaging, email, video, voice chat, file sharing, blogging, and discussion groups. I prefer email or messaging over chat. It's an easy way to keep in touch with friends that have gone off to college or family that has moved away. Saves on postage and a long distance phone bill. I also wanted to add a personal experience I had on phishing. It happened through Myspace, and I'm not exactly how people go about making them but one day I noticed that bulletins were being posted under my name about adult sites and comments were randomly being left on peoples pages. I was told that if you login in on Myspace when there is a red bar above the login square that, that is someone copying your information to get inside your page. But in order to fix the problem I just had to go back in and change my password.

Fantastic Voyage Inside The Cell

I chose to view David Bolinsky's speech on the voyage inside the cell. I thought it would be rather interesting. It was but sadly it was rather short. He spent the first 6minutes out of ten explaining how there is truth and beauty in things and that some don't quite see that when you talk about science and cells. The studies that are being done at Harvard are coming up with animations of the life inside cells and visually displaying what is going on. The three minute clip that he shared was amazing. When it comes to learning I need to do it visually and that is exactly what the video was teaching. David Bolinsky said that they only know a percent of what is going on and that they plan on continuing this for the next 4-5 years. I'm taking online biology this semester and I know that if videos like his were made available to the course it would make it more enjoyable and much better to understand.

Web Time

WOW! I spend a lot of my time on the internet. Somewhere between 30-35 hours a week. I'm taking four online classes right now which is where most of my internet time is going to. I do have a life outside of my room on the internet I promise. These are the websites that I visited this week:
www.thomsonedu.com - this is for my online biology class and for the online labs that we do.
www.myspace.com - to keep in touch with people and just for fun.
www.rcc.vccs.edu - pretty self explanatory, blackboard and email.
www.google.com - research purposes and help with studying for classes.
www.pheer.com - a website that displays shows going on in this area.
www.purevolume.com - a website that has signed and unsigned bands that you can check out by genre or alphabetically and download or just check out some of their music.
www.ticketmaster.com - for purchasing tickets, which wouldn't allow me to purchase my ticket.
Again I try to stay away from the computer as much as I can when I don't have any assignments to work on, but these are the websites that I usually check on, on a regular basis.

TED Talk

I chose Dan Gilbert's talk "Why are we happy? Why aren't we happy?" He brings up a very important topic that I don't think many people have taken the time to realize, or I believe that there would be many more people who were happy. Dan believes that synthetic happiness is better than natural happiness. Synthetic happiness is what we make of a situation when we don't get what we want, and natural happiness is where we do get what we want. Being the selfish race that we are many would agree that it's always better to just get what we want. That is when Dan supported his idea with graphs and research. He put up two pictures, one of a man winning the lottery and the other of a paraplegic and asked the audience which would they rather be. Of course everyone wanted to win the lottery. But taking a poll a year later the paraplegic people were equally as happy as the ones that had won the lottery. I think that you will find a genuinely happy person from someone that uses synthetic happiness. Being able to accept the things that you can't change and finding a way to just be happy with what has happened, I believe will make you a stronger person and will also be able to cope with negative situations a lot easier than those who feed more off of natural happiness. William Shakespeare said, "Tis nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so." I really enjoyed listening to what Dan had to say and I recommend it to those who believe that happiness can be found in not always getting your way.

Education by Internet

I can't remember the last time that I picked up a book and read through it in order to write a research paper. My only source tends to be the Internet. It is much more efficient and doesn't have a due date. Since starting college I have taken an online class each semester. At the moment I am taking three online classes and an online biology lab. It much easier to work from a computer at home or anywhere now with wireless internet, than to have to sit in a class room for hours.

I think that in five years most education will be over the internet. Like I stated above, it's much easier to manage with today's fast paced society. The Internet is growing. We bought my grandparents a computer a few years back and now she'll send me emails or call me over to set up some new feature for her. If education were to increase even more over the Internet, and not have online classes just for college students than perhaps when little Timmy would normally have a problem in class he could have his mother right next to him to help with the problem or to make sure that he is doing his work and paying attention.

When I think of how the Internet could change to meet the needs of students better I can only think of the RCC blackboard. To me I think that it could be organized a little better. It's much easier for me to read a list of assignments with their due dates and links in order, rather than being directed and redirected to multiple links that have list of things that are due in no particular order. Other than that I never seem to have a problem with the Internet except for the fact that they do not offer anything other than dial up where I live.

Videoconferencing would be a way to connect different peoples and nations of the world in an academic setting. Perhaps set up something like we are doing, a blog and each member give information about themselves and what they know of their background, and post any questions that they may have about someone else's and get a better understanding of the different places that we come from. Than to all get the same learning experience teach through the video conferencing.

Schools Killing Creativity

Personally I agree with what Sir Ken had to say. Schools try to guide you down this one way path with no room for creativity. Growing up I was always told by my grandparents that if you don't go to school and study hard then you won't get into college and be able to have a decent job. And attending school that seemed to be the issue that they pressed with the students. I also agree with Sir Ken when he said that children are not scared to be wrong. Growing up through schools it seems as though students start to do only what is asked of them or expected of them. They don't take that chance to do something different and risk the fact it could be wrong. They don't get extra points for being creative so they don't bother with it. They start to think that it is not necessary. "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original." Schools teach you by the book and that leads kids to doing that as well. In order to change this, I think that schools need to have a requirement for an art class throughout each grade level. Children shouldn't be punished for their creativity or imagination, it's something that makes everyone unique.

About Me

Hello, my name is Nia. I am 19 years old and I am going on my second year of college at Rappahannock Community College. I plan on moving to Richmond next semester and transfer to Virginia Commonwealth University. I plan on majoring in photography and minoring in computer science and hopefully doing some web designing on the side.

I'm a full time student and a manager at a movie theater. I'm signed with a modeling agency and I'm in a commercial.

When I find myself with some free time I enjoy taking pictures and watching movies.